Microwave irradiation offers a clean, inexpensive, and convenient method of heating, which is an alternative way of introducing energy into chemical systems. In particular, applications of microwave irradiation technology for petroleum processing have been developed in the last twenty years. The main objective of this paper is to review the use of microwave irradiation technology as an alternative technique applied during petroleum refining and primary processing of petroleum fluids, presenting and discussing successful applications of this technology as a tool for petroleum emulsion separation and catalytic reactions normally found at hydrorefining plants.

A distribuição de pesos moleculares de resinas poliolefínicas é freqüentemente analisada em termos da existência de bimodalidades e com auxílio de técnicas de desconvolução. As condições necessárias para a obtenção de uma resina poliolefínica bimodal são apresentadas em função das características cinéticas dos sítios ativos presentes no catalisador, sendo que um certo grau de bimodalidade sempre pode ser definido para essas resinas. Distribuições de peso molecular de Schulz-Flory dinâmicas são neste trabalho derivadas para a utilização em problemas de desconvolução, quando a dinâmica da concentração de monômero não pode ser desprezada. É demonstrado que a utilização de distribuições de Schulz-Flory padrão, nestas condições, leva à detecção de sítios ativos inexistentes no sistema catalítico.

The deconvolution of molecular weight distributions (MWD) may be useful to obtain information about the polymerization kinetics and properties of catalytic systems. However, deconvolution techniques are normally based on steady-state assumptions and very little has been reported about the use of non-stationary approaches for deconvolution of MWDs. In spite of that, polymerization reactions are often performed in batch or semi-batch modes. For this reason, dynamic solutions are proposed here for simple kinetic models and are then used for deconvolution of actual MWD data. Deconvolution results obtained with dynamic models are compared to deconvolution results obtained with the standard stationary Flory-Schulz distributions. For coordination polymerizations, results show that dynamic MWD models are able to describe experimental data with fewer catalytic sites, which indicates that the proper interpretation of the reaction dynamics may be of fundamental importance for kinetic characterization. On the other hand, reaction dynamics induced by modification of chain transfer agent concentrations seems to play a minor role on the shape of the MWD in free-radical polymerizations